Saturday, 31 January 2015

Robots

I wouldn't like to calculate the number of hours I've spent during the last few years struggling to decipher the squiggly "RECAPTCHA" riddles in order to let me comment on people's blogs.

It's sometimes virtually impossible to achieve the required answer on a mobile phone and rather like the time I visited Diss and was beaten back by high winds, I've just given up in disgust. My fellow bloggers just don't realize the amount of pith (and wind) they have missed in their comment streams.

But wait! The good Denizens of Captcha have now come up with a far more sophisticated barrier to robot picking of blog locks and it appears to be a masterstroke. This is what they say on their blog:

But, we figured it would be easier to just directly ask our users whether or not they are robots—so, we did! We’ve begun rolling out a new API that radically simplifies the reCAPTCHA experience. We’re calling it the “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” and this is how it looks:

Yes! Now that artificial intelligence networked banks of computers can decipher the squiggly text, the brilliant new ruse is to ask the user to declare "I'm not a robot". Genius.

It makes commenting on blogs so much easier so let's hope the massive super-computers run by bandit Russian spamsters and that bloke in the US who doesn't like women don't catch on to the fiendish ploy and work out how to, er, tick the box.

When that first came out, it still gave me an unreadable captcha. Finally, I twigged that I had to tick the follow-up comment box before the I'm not a robot box. I think they might have corrected that now, though.